Yes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it’s official. There is zero evidence of Lymphoma in my biopsy. I don’t have cancer and am in no imminent danger of being given X months to live.
Yesterday I went back to visit my chums in the Haematology and Oncology department situated in Outpatients West at BRI. I’ve described it at great length in the past, so won’t get into lots of detail, except to say that some awfulness was on the TV which seemed to be some kind of kids version of “Gladiators” with some Ant and Dec clones babbling away (silently with subtitles).
Nobody offered me any tea.
On this occasion I got to see Doctor Adrian, the mop haired vaguely mad chap I’ve come to know over many years. As usual he struggled to get his concepts across in laymans language, but was able to inform me that I have Sarcoidosis, a condition I know very little about other than it is a standard plot device in House, along with Lupus and Wagners’ Disease. It looks like I’m showing pretty typical symptoms, presenting with enlarge lymph nodes in the chest, but not elsewhere and my biopsy is full of granuloma which are sarcoid in nature.
From what I have been reading sarcoid is an auto immune thing, where the t-cells cluster up in whichever organs and form clumps, which are the granuloma they see in my biopsy. Nobody really knows why and there is no definitive test for sarcoid. The only way to really diagnose it is by ruling out everything else. Long term prospects are pretty good on the whole, but it does need to be addressed.
I think one thing I badly need to stop doing is looking up shit on the Interweb. I’ve been reading about this condition and basically, any {insert symptom here} is an indication of Sarcoid. Feeling a bit depressed? Sarcoid! Feeling a bit tired? Sarcoid! Ankles hurt? Sarcoid! Generally unwell in any way, shape, manner or form? Yes, that’ll be the Sarcoid! I’m thus unsure if I can ever be ill with anything else ever again. I forsee myself walking into my GP having spontaneously grown an extra nose out of my arse[1], and he’ll be saying “Ah, yes – this is a typical symptom of Sarcoidosis, we’ll treat with steroids.”
So, for those of you who have been reading these musings, I can report that the journey is not yet over. More tests are required to see what organs are affected and in particular, the lungs need testing. Of all the organs in the body, the one which is really badly affected by Sarcoid is the lungs which can be left permanently scarred. Doctor Adrian is therefore referring me to a chest consultant, who will more than likely be wanting to do a battery of lung function tests to ensure my lungs are working properly. As an ex-smoker, I wish the lung doctors all the best with deciding which damage is from the nic sticks and which is from sarcoid.
Which leaves me only to report on the mystery of the bizarre random blood, which delayed my surgery a couple of weeks ago. You may recall that despite having spent a day poking, prodding and sticking me with needles to prepare, for some reason when it came to the actual day, Richard the Surgeon decided he couldn’t cut me up because the blood was the wrong type and I needed the bizarre random blood on standby just in case.
As this may well be the last time I see Doctor Adrian for a few months[2] I asked him about this. He made a few phone calls and said they would get back to him. Meantime he gave me a new prescription for the epilepsy[3] drugs his colleague Dr Sood had given me a few weeks earlier and told me if I popped back after I’d picked those up, he’d hang about and tell me what he had heard from Jimmy’s. All things considered, he might be a mop-haired mad professor type, but he basically a good egg.
The pharmacy was very busy indeed. This meant that I got to play a good few rounds of “My Paper Aeroplane 2” whilst waiting for my drugs and so it was gone 5pm when I got back to outpatients west. On arrival I was intercepted by the (apparently popular and in demand) Staff Nurse Ellie who whisked me into the blood test unit and informed me that the phlebotomists[4] had gone home, so she was going to do me some bloods and Doctor Adrian would see me after. Unfortunately, her first attempt was quite frustrating, for whatever reason, although my vein didn’t want to bleed into her needle, though was quite happy to bleed profusely out of the hole the needle left. We decided to throw caution to the wind and she next went to my other arm and attacked the mad sticky outy vein with much more success.
Many tiny bottles of blood later, I pottered along to Doctor Adrian’s office to see what was going on. He was able to tell me that the basic news was that I am A+ blood type. This comes as no real surprise as my Dad is A+. He believes my mum was also A+, although my sister is of the firm belief she was O-. In either case, genetically speaking, (O-)+(A+)=(A+) so that’s what I am. As for the strange antibodies which contribute to the bizarre randomness of my blood, he couldn’t comment as they didn’t have that information to hand. So – he’s ordered these blood tests, to be sent to the local transfusion service. This means that they will have done complete tests of my blood type and any odd antibodies that are present and these records will be permanently available in the Leeds/Bradford area, which will mean that if I need a transfusion at any point in the future (locally at least) that information is immediately available and there will be no confusion.
I should be able to find out exactly what is going on, from the results of these tests, which I will be able to (with any luck) ask Richard the Surgeon about, when I go and visit him in a couple of weeks for a check up.
[1] Clearly the worst possible place to grow an extra nose.
[2] I still need to go back next August for my annual ‘let’s make sure you don’t have myeloma’ test.
[3] Also peripheral neuropathic pain
[4] Professional vampires